


Like the Leaves Come Fall

by DesdemonaKaylose



Category: Hanna Is Not A Boy's Name
Genre: Burnplay, Cutting, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Unresolved Sexual Tension, this makes it sound much darker than it is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-13
Updated: 2016-11-13
Packaged: 2018-08-30 19:36:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8546473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: Conrad and Worth have different opinions about pain and who deserves it.





	

**Author's Note:**

> A tumblr request. Written to [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aXurP3CLTA)

For the first hour, Conrad refuses to leave the front room. He sits uncomfortably in the rolling chair behind the desk, like a receptionist, with his arms crossed tightly over his chest against both the cold and his irritation. Worth wanders through the office vaguely, picking up bottles to see how much liquid is left at their bottoms and flipping over accumulations of papers with no clear purposes. Hanna doesn’t come back. For the second hour Conrad slumps in the chair, picking flecks of lint from his wool coat with an intensity that nearly becomes a full blown compulsion, until he pulls the whole thing off and flips it over in his lap to get to the rest of the fabric. When Hanna said he might be gone the rest of the night, Conrad guesses he really meant it.

Against the door, hunched like a forgotten scarecrow, Worth says, “Can still go home, yannow.”

Conrad snaps to attention. “No,” he says, “no. I said I'd wait for him, so I’ll wait for him.”

Worth rolls his eyes, but even that motion is lackluster. He seems tired. It’s hard to tell with him because he plays his cards so waspishly close to his chest, but there’s definitely something of exhaustion in the way he holds himself. It’s loose, almost drunken, but ginger as if covering some injury. Conrad thinks of cats, who can have their knuckles snipped off and still act as if nothing at all is wrong with them. Cats don’t know it, but if they’d just acted a bit more wounded and miserable about the whole process, people would have figured out a lot sooner what was going on.

“You don’t have to stay out here,” Conrad offers, warily. “I’m not gonna steal anything or… wreck up the place, or whatever. If you want to sleep don’t let me stop you.”

“Ain’t gonna sleep,” Worth says. He puffs a dismissive breath out his nose. “Sleep when yer dead.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” Conrad mutters. There are no windows here, but there is still the dawn coming in a few hours, whether he can see it or not. If Hanna gets back in after that, he’s not sure what they’ll do.

“Stop pickin at that,” Worth says, leveling a bleary eye at the coat in Conrad’s hands.

Conrad stops abruptly, the old shame flashing to the surface, and then he feels the twitchiness in his fingers slowly but steadily starting to build. He clenches them a couple times. He goes back to picking again, this time snatching at each fleck with way more fervor than necessary. “I’ll pick at whatever I damn well please,” he says, ripping miniscule threads free with a snap of his wrist.

Worth sighs through his nose. “You don’t gotta worry so hard. Hanna’s been survivin weirder shit than tonight since long before you two freak shows met him.”

“Who’s worried?” Conrad retorts, stupidly, because he knows he’s transparent and he always has been. But he’s not just worried, he’s exasperated too. Hanna leaves him behind because Hanna is, apparently, concerned about him. He guesses. It doesn’t seem to be possible to make the man understand that Conrad has been taking care of himself since he learned how to call 911 for his mother in primary school. It’s really disconcerting to be babied by a guy who looks like he’s twelve and knowingly lives in a building with the structural integrity of a cardboard box.

Worth sighs again. He pushes off the door and scuttles into the back room, whence he eventually emerges again with a fist-sized bottle of clear and almost certainly alcoholic liquid. He drops it on the table with a grunt and then disappears again.

The label says Smirnoff. It looks like an unopened travel size vodka, in whipped cream flavor, and it seems like the kind of thing a sorority would keep in its medicine cabinet, not a quite-probable addict with an actual playboy calendar on the wall. It looks like the kind of thing Conrad would get ripped on mercilessly for owning.

Worth returns with an absolutely terrifying syringe in his hand. He holds it between his teeth like a cutlass while he unwraps his arm, peeling bandages that seem to be held in place more by human sweat and oil than any drying wound. They’re always there, as far as Conrad can tell. It’s not the first time he’s spotted them under the doctor’s coat sleeves.

“Fuckin—veins,” Worth mumbles, squeezing the sallow flesh until he presumably finds something large enough to tap. Conrad wants to ask what the hell he thinks he’s doing, but it’s actually pretty obvious what he thinks he’s doing, and Conrad doesn’t know how to tell him to stop it without coming off like a queasy child or a high strung nanny. And, possibly, he might sort of want to see how this turns out.

Worth plunges the needle into a sufficient vein and draws up thick heavy liquid, just enough to turn clear vodka a swirling hazy pink. It spreads tendrils through the bottle like a many-legged sea creature unfurling. Conrad watches it without blinking.

“Here,” Worth says, as he unceremoniously shoves the overfull bottle into Conrad’s hands. The plastic sides are wet with spill over.

Conrad holds it delicately for a moment, cupped in his hands where it sits lukewarm and still swirling. Doc Worth's was the first human blood he ever tasted. The moment is indelibly inked into his memory—the warmth quickly cooling against the fall air, the bitter tang, the salt, the myriad of subtle flavors that he still doesn’t understand. Twice now he’s drunk Doc Worth’s blood. Three times—would that mean anything?

The thing is, Conrad isn’t totally unaware of what things like these could mean. He’s read Anne Rice, okay, he knows there are certain connotations to his condition and, while he wouldn’t go so far as to endorse them all, he’s not naïve enough to pretend no one else is thinking about them too.

“Thanks wouldn’t go amiss,” Worth grunts, thumbing absently at the puncture wound in his arm. Red smears under the pad of his finger, as it presses tight and releases in the miniature parody of cardiac compressions.

“I didn’t ask you to do that,” Conrad says. He licks his fingers, wet with thickened alcohol, and suppresses a shudder of desire. With the fingers of his other hand halfway to his mouth, he pauses at a noise from Worth’s direction—soft, barely audible, but hard like the involuntary release of air after a blow to the chest—and he looks up. The second their eyes meet, Worth switches his attention to the carton in his pocket, busying himself lighting up his second cigarette of the night.

The flesh on his bare arm is almost iridescent with pale scars, flecks of sediment in a strange stone. The tendons in his wrist twitch as he flicks the wheel of his lighter. Abruptly, Conrad tips back and drinks a stinging mouthful of salty sweet vodka.

Worth makes an approving noise. He tucks the lighter away and shakes out his hand, as if he burned it somewhere in the process.

“’M closing up shop,” he says, like it’s something he’s just decided to reveal to Conrad after long and serious deliberation. “Come up stairs if ya don’t wanna sit in the dark.”

“What if Hanna shows up?” Conrad asks. Then he wonders why it was an “if”, and whether he ought to start being more afraid than he is.

Worth shrugs, already walking away. “Place is made of tissue paper. He shout’s ‘n we’ll hear.”

The “we” in that reassurance startles something in Conrad that he hadn’t known he was carrying. More than anything, it’s that strange flutter that convinces him to scale the stairs after Worth, into the intimidating world of his private rooms. The steps creak reproachfully under his weight.

The area above the office, as far as Conrad can tell, is probably unsafe to live in and a couple years from a full collapse, except for the apparent bedroom, which is tucked against the back wall of the building and most likely draws its structural integrity from the apartment on the other side. Conrad lingers in the hall, until morbid fascination forces him to peek past the door frame. He was expecting a lot of old takeout containers and loose garbage, but the first sweep of the dimness reveals nothing much other than blankets. The whole floor is a swath of blankets, deflated pillows, dirty and possibly clean clothing, with a slightly higher spot against the wall that might indicate a mattress.

It’s weird. Conrad looks around at it, and thinks that Worth must not spend much time up here. He must really only come up to sleep and change.

“Ya gonna lurk in the door all night?” Worth asks, shooting an irritated glance over his shoulder as he unwraps his other arm. There are a few strands of gauze lost in the chaos of blankets, too many for a recent problem, but not as many as you would think for chronic injuries. Conrad gets the impression he doesn’t change them that often. He doesn’t smell much blood here, even old blood, and he just doesn’t know what to make of that.

He searches for a lightswitch and finds nothing, which makes sense when he finally squints upward and finds the ceiling empty of light fixtures.

“Christ,” Worth mutters. “Siddown, princess.”

Conrad pulls his hand back from the wall, shifts his weight nervously, and then finally searches for a clean looking patch of blanket on the floor. There’s no way he’s sitting on the mattress, even if it wasn’t swarming with the ghosts of potential past intimacies. Worth is already sitting there, pulling his shoes off and tossing them at the mostly empty closet. Instead, Conrad takes a spot against the wall beside the edge, where the balled up sheet is white and it ought to be pretty obvious if something is wrong with it.

He drinks his muddied vodka. It’s not really doing anything for him, which he guesses he shouldn’t be surprised by. Why would alcohol affect him the same way it used to? But anyways it’s something to do with his hands while the dim silence stretches out between them.

“Can I ask you about…”

Worth blows a cloud of smoke, a white puff in the darkness. The light from the cracked hall door lights it up in a stripe, creating a false sense of ink-blot symmetry. As the silence stretches out, brittle and uncertain, he rolls his head to level his beady gaze at Conrad. “Y’can do anythin, princess.”

Conrad holds the tiny bottle of Smirnoff up to the line of light, and then downs the rest of it. It tastes nothing like whipped cream. Aside from the blood, it tastes like the inside of a vanilla bottle.

“About the,” he says, and he taps his arm vaguely, where the skin underneath his coat is smooth and unblemished.

Worth says nothing, but his stillness is a tell of its own kind. The cigarette smokes in his unmoving hand. “Not,” he says, “if ya can’t even say the words, kid.”

Conrad is maybe six years younger than the doctor, and he bristles at the casual dismissiveness.

“Don’t call me kid,” he says. “What do you think I am, some pink cheeked freshman from bumfuck Iowa?”

That’s enough to break the wary stillness–-Worth lifts the cigarette and takes another breath. “Awright,” he says. “So then ask the damn question and I might think about answerin.”

In the darkness his scars are all but invisible, except where the line of light slices through him. The first thing that comes to mind is to ask “what are they?” But in truth, of course Conrad already knows. What he really wants to know is why. He’s got one shot at this, and if he comes off the wrong kind of patronizing that’s the end of it. He just wants to understand. Worth is so difficult, deliberately obfuscating, and Conrad just wants to begin to unravel the knot of what he really is. He might not get another armistice like this one.

“Did you do it because you liked it,” Conrad asks, slowly, “or did you do it because you didn’t?”

They are only a handsbreadth from each other, in the piles of bedding. Conrad’s fingers twitch with the desire to reach out for him. It’s cold up here, even with his coat back on, cold enough that every couple seconds his mind cycles through the same hypotheticals, each iteration making the desire a little stronger. Take up one of the blankets? No. Unsanitary. Lie down against the sheet? Ineffectual. Move closer to Worth, lean against his side, unite their temporary warmths—he is almost certainly hotter than Conrad, who runs now at a perpetual lukewarmth.

“Both,” Worth says, blowing it out on a cloud of smoke.

“How can it be both?”

Worth’s blood is thin and clots slowly—without any particular emotion, he presses his thumb again to the pinprick needlewound, breaking the fragile seal. It smells delicious and familiar.

“You ever wonder how much you can really take?” Worth asks him.

Conrad stops trying to tap free the last drop from the bottom of the bottle. “Of what?” he says.

Worth shrugs. “How much,” he says again. “Anything. All of it. Don’t eat cause you wanna know how far you can take it. Take a hit you shouldnta taken.”

“Oh,” Conrad says. “No, I’ve never really done that.” And then, after a moment of lip chewing, he adds, “I learned pretty early that you have to fix problems before they get worse.”

“Didn’t think you’d get it."

Conrad scowls. “That doesn’t mean I don’t _get_ it.”

“Kinda does, sweetheart.”

In a fit of irritation, Conrad flicks the empty plastic bottle at Worth’s head, and immediately regrets it. The plastic makes a dull _thunk_ against the man's skull. Worth blinks, a couple of times, and then levels Conrad with a stare that makes him feel about two inches tall. He winces.

“Sorry,” he starts to say, but then there's the same bottle bouncing off the bridge of his own nose and ricocheting across the room. “Ow,” he says, even though it doesn’t really hurt. “Okay. I guess I deserved that.”

Worth stares even harder, and then he collapses back onto the mattress, his head only a few inches from Conrad’s shoulder. He lays his hands on the bony swell of his own chest, resembling in no small way a corpse waiting for discovery. Smoke trails up from the cigarette in his teeth.

“That,” Worth says. “Still don’t get that. Y'look like the kinda kid I wouldn’t even have to shake down for milk money. Then you come outta nowhere with a spine, and I still don’t know when you’re gonna do it.”

Conrad snorts. “It’s called picking your battles. I’m not gonna try to break your teeth for throwing a bottle at my head, especially when I started it.”

Worth makes a neutral noise. He probably has no concept of picking his battles. As far as Conrad can tell, Worth treats everything in his path with the same rawhide relentlessness.

“I have, um,” Conrad says, “I have been known to—in the past I mean—I’ve let people hurt me. For a while I thought I deserved it.”

There’s a faint shifting, movement, as if Worth is tensing. His fingertips seem to be pressed tighter into his chest now.

“Did you think you deserved it?” Conrad asks. He asks quietly, without emotion—his voice unspools from his mouth like so much gray thread.

Worth’s fingers visibly tighten. “Nobody deserves anythin,” he says.

“That’s not true,” Conrad says. “Good people deserve good things.”

“’M not a good person,” Worth says, like a challenge. The cherry end of his cigarette glows. “Whadda I deserve, St. Conrad?”

“You’re not a _bad_ person,” Conrad hedges, afraid that if he shifts too close to a sincere emotion this might all blow up in his hands. He _doesn’t_ think Worth is a bad person. An asshole for sure, but that’s not the same.

Worth lets out a laugh like leaves crackling, like pipes rattling. “Lookit you. You thought you were a bad guy so you deserved bad shit, and now you’re tryin to convince yourself you’re a good person so you can deserve good shit. Right now, if I could convince you that you were bad again, I bet you’d go back to takin whatever folks put on ya.”

That’s alarming. Conrad leans away from him, suddenly wary of the power that this man might or might not have over him. Old patterns are too easy to fall back into. He doesn't want to know how quickly he could be dropped back to the bottom of the ladder.

Worth laughs again, but this time it’s hash and brief. “Sweetheart, look. Nobody deserves nothin. You’ll get the same thing comin to ya regardless of whether ya think ya deserve it or not. Better just be whatever ya are.”

“Nihilist,” Conrad mutters.

“Call me what I am,” Worth agrees. He draws the cigarette from his mouth, burned down to a stub by now, and regards the glowing coal end thoughtfully. “You do it to yourself,” he says, “hard enough so nobody can do you worse. Then you know what you can take.”

He taps ash from the end and then, with the cold interest of a scientist administering toxic chemicals to a lab animal, puts it out on his own inner arm. Conrad starts, toppling sideways in his haste to get the burning thing out of the doctor’s hand. Worth breathes through his clenched teeth, a hissing wet noise, as he almost arches up off the bed. Conrad’s scrabbling hands catch his arms and pry the cigarette loose, now quite dead and dark. He holds it as far away from them both as he can, like a cursed object.

“What the _fuck_ ,” he snarls.

Worth lets out a sigh, deep and relieved, before cracking an eye open. “Would you believe,” he says, “I never actually done that before?”

“Well why the fuck would you do it now?”

Worth looks up at him. For the first time all evening his features are smoothed, the tightness in his lips gone. He looks hard at Conrad. His eyes reflect a thread of light from the cracked door.

“Here’s the deal,” he says. “You like me too much. Dunno what I ever did to you to make _that_ happen, but I ain’t blind. You like me too much.”

“I do not—” Conrad starts, and then falters. They have known each other for a while now. It’s been some time since Conrad stopped thinking of him as a chore to be dealt with. “Barely,” he says, instead. “I _barely_ like you. Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

Worth looks pointedly at his own arm, which is now encircled by both of Conrad’s hands. “Put your thumb in there,” he says. “On the burn.”

“ _What?_ No,” Conrad says. “The hell would I do that for?”

“If you don’t like me,” Worth says, “shouldn’t be a problem. Dig it in there.”

Reflexively, Conrad’s grip on his arm tightens. “That’s barbaric, and besides which it wouldn’t _prove_ anything. I don’t just go around hurting people because I don’t _like them_ enough not to.”

“Okay,” Worth says. “Then do it cause I want you to.”

“ _Why?”_

“Cause I like ya,” Worth says, simply. He tucks his other hand under his head, getting comfortable.

“You… like me?” Conrad says, and suddenly this is somehow the most important thing about their conversation.

“That’s the problem,” Worth says, closing his eyes like a sunbather on the beach. “If I liked you ‘n you didn’t like me, we’d be fine. I’m not at a time in my life where I’m lookin to make friends.”

“I’m lost,” Conrad says, frowning deeply. “Even if us liking each other was actually a problem, what the hell would me sticking my thumb in your burn wound do to solve it?”

“Oh, nothin. I just want ya to.”

“You are _extremely_ irritating, do you know that?”

Eyes still closed, Worth grins his most insufferable grin. “It’s not just about who deserves what,” he says, possibly in reference to their earlier discussion. “I like knowin what I can take. I like knowin who’s givin it to me.”

Something hot flips in Conrad’s belly, a coal suddenly unearthed. “That’s still pretty unhealthy,” he points out. “Look at this thing, I mean, you’re going to have a scar. Er, another one. Eventually you’re going to run out of body to destroy.”

“My problem,” Worth says easily. “Not yours.”

Conrad thinks, _uneasily,_ that somewhere in the course of this conversation it might have become just that. He doesn’t know what to do with his growing proprietary interest in Worth’s body.

“C’mon,” Worth says. “What’s it gonna hurt? Scar’ll happen either way.”

Conrad swallows. The doctor has an unnerving ability to talk him around to things he ought to be dead against. He really doesn’t want to hurt anybody, but he thinks of the tight hissing breath and the arching spine, the lovely strange tension of Doc Worth’s body, a sculpture of bones and not much else. For a man who spits venom as indiscriminately as a wild animal, he is remarkably delicate. He is remarkably vulnerable. Conrad thinks, everything taken into account, he could probably break the man if he took half a mind to.

He slides his thumb down the expanse of lined skin, feeling some of the knots of scar tissue raised under the pad of his finger. It’s almost too intimate. It’s too much to know, and Conrad finds that he doesn’t want to stop. He hovers above the burn mark, imagining that the skin there is even hotter than the rest, that he can feel the heat from it coiling through the air. He looks down at Worth and finds his eyes open again, fixed and intent.

Conrad digs in. Worth throws his head to the side, breath rasping out of his body. When Conrad loosens his grip the whole of his body slumps, soft and unguarded—when he clenches down again everything shudders, spasming. You could play Worth’s body like a piano, if you wanted to.

“Is that,” Conrad starts, as he watches the impossible softness released again underneath him. “Is that good?”

Worth’s cheek is still against the sheet, mouth open as he takes deep steadying breaths. He licks his lips, rolling his gaze up to meet Conrad’s.

“It’s somethin,” he says.

The hot bed of coals underneath Conrad’s ribs flare to a terrible life.


End file.
